The Answer To City Ills Is To Reverse The Urbanization Process

October 9, 1985|By Charley Reese of the Sentinel Staff

Acity is a good place to make money but it's not fit to live in. I confess that I am not a student of rat behavior like the $l00-an-hour experts. Because I make my living helping to peddle papers at 25 cents a copy, I can only afford to observe people. My observations are that once a city gets much beyond l00,000 souls, it isn't fit to live in. It loses its sense of community. It becomes instead a collection of strangers.

Criminals today, when they want to hide, do not go to remote canyons or out-of-the-way small towns. They head for a city where they can be swallowed up by anonymity and benefit even further by the failure of government, which also is a characteristic of cities.

It is the loss of the sense of community that makes a city ungovernable. Most cities today in America are run by elites for the benefit of elites. Most city governments can be said to be in the commercial development business. Service is to city governments what a newspaper owner once said news was to him: a necessary nuisance.

The irony is that cities end up being run by elites for elites because only the elites maintain a sense of community. They are, by defition, few in number. They tend to know each other, to socialize with each other, to share the same general goals. They do not intend to nor do they think they do exclude or in any way harm the common people in most cases. These folks are unknown to them, as anonymous as grass in the parks, a part of the landscape whose existence is acknowledged but essentially has no meaning. The elites just tend to believe that everybody agrees with them.

This illusion of agreement is easy to maintain because the effect of the city on the common people is to make them apathetic. Each one tends to feel isolated and powerless as indeed all of them are so long as they remain isolated.

The function of the politician in the modern city is to be a broker for the elite, to deliver the people's assent to what the elite wants to do. This is necessary because today's elite has to live with the inconvenience of the universal franchise. If you cannot prevent people from voting, then the next best thing to do is to make sure they have a choice of voting only for your man A or your man B. The size of the city makes this easier because size makes campaigns incredibly expensive, thus effectively screening out those candidates who cannot tap into the elitists' funds.

The small town has the same cross section of people that the city does, only there are fewer of them in a smaller space. Of necessity, they know one another, and this personal knowledge acts as a restraint, makes it impossible or at least difficult for one group to ignore the existence and interests of another. The limited number of souls makes each one accessible to the other and thus people with limited funds can run and be elected to office. Money has less clout in a small town than in a big city.

Moreover, both the elite and the common people share a sense of belonging to a particular place, of being a part of the same larger entity, of sharing the same general destiny. A town can be ''our town'' in a way a city can never be ''our city.''

Humans tend to be still essentially tribal. If you take a small number of blacks, whites and Hispanics, they will mingle successfully. If you have a large number of blacks, whites and Hispanics, they will tend to segregate themselves. Thus, large cities tend to fragment into ethnic and racial groups, which also destroys the sense of community. This has nothing to do with racism or government policy but is merely a characteristic of human nature, which has yet to evolve out of its tribal origins.

The only answer, I believe, to so-called urban ills is to find a way to reverse the urbanization process and to regroup into smaller, more livable units. Virtually all environmental problems boil down to nothing more than concentration of too many people into too limited a space.

To deurbanize, however, we must change the structure of our economy because concentration of jobs is what has dictated the geographic distribution of people.